Naturally, my work has suffered from these constant shifts. So much so that I lost sight of what I was doing and started trying to do too much. I was trying to look at a book instead of a sentence.

Let me explain.

When you’re an undergraduate, you look at a field (your major) pretty broadly. Like a whole book, with a number of chapters. It’s still focused, in the sense that it’s one book, but it’s also pretty broad. In graduate school, when you work towards a Master’s Degree, you open up your book and pick one chapter. Your focus narrows and you learn a whole lot about a comparatively small part of your field. There’s still a lot of room to play around, but the barriers are there, and you’re starting to see just how much is actually IN that chapter.

A PhD is when you narrow your focus more, until you’re looking at one of the sentences in that chapter. Just one. You see how much information is packed into one sentence, and you become an expert in that. You become really good at something very small. That’s how it should be.

Instead, I tried writing a prospectus that examined Gender studies, Queer theory, Rhetorical studies, Visual rhetoric, Digital rhetoric, Behavioral Psychology, Communication theory, Identity theory… the list goes on. I was trying to look at the whole book. Maybe even at the whole library.

Needless to say, I’ve thrown out what I had so far. Now I’m trying to focus again. I’m back to my bonzai tree.

Or, if you prefer another analogy: I’ve found that I need to climb a mountain. There’s a path that others have gone on before, and I need to follow that path. I need to meet the Sherpas and become friends with them. I need to decide if any of them are crazy, stupid, or wrong, and I need to decide which ones I like the best. Then, with the help of those sherpas, I’m going to find my own path down the other side of the mountain. Maybe someone else has been there before. Maybe I’ll just be finding a short cut, or pointing out a path. Maybe I’ll be blazing a new one. But what matters is that I learn about THIS mountain, about THESE sherpas.

So that’s what I’m up to now.

And it has me wondering something: Does greater variety beget homogeny? That is, do the additional options for self-presentation (avatars etc) make people LESS likely to be different? Do people become more realistic, or follow the same accepted ‘ideal’ shape and end up with nearly identical avatars?

I don’t know…. but it has me thinking.

That’s both liberating and terrifying. It’s liberating because I am finally able to start on my dissertation. It’s terrifying for exactly the same reason. I have to write a dissertation. This is a book, and a scholarly one.

On a certain level, I have been preparing for this for a long time. I knew as an undergrad that I wanted a PhD. I knew I was going to have to do this. I’ve been collecting advice on the subject ever since. And I’ve been teaching myself to write in a way that would make a dissertation easier for years now. So, for example, I know that I shouldn’t look at it as a single 160 page paper. Instead, I should look at it as 8 papers of 20 pages each (I have 8 chapters planned). Writing a twenty page paper isn’t scary; that’s just a few days of work, along with a few weeks of research.

Lucky me, I have the research already. I’ve been researching and thinking about this topic to the exclusion of all other scholarly work for almost a year now. Since mid October of last year, when I failed my specialty exam, I’ve been focusing on this topic with all of my academic strength. That’s about eleven months of research. Which is great; I have a stack of books and papers that I’ve gone through. I have pages and pages of quotes. I have a bibliography that has more than fifty sources in it.

Unfortunately, that means I don’t really have any excuse NOT to write. So I have to do it. Which means I have to give myself permission to write. I’m told that’s the hardest part: giving yourself permission to write. And I don’t seem to have a choice. Which is good.

Something else I learned is that I am not writing a final draft. I’m not writing a rough draft (I’ve talked about how I hate that term), but I’m not writing a finished product either. Right now, I’m just writing. I’m putting quotes where I can think of them, but I’m also putting in notes to myself (like to FIND a quote). I’m letting it flow out, getting the ideas down on paper (figuratively), but I’m not thinking of this as the final project. While the end result may be 160 pages, I’m expecting to write about five times that (which would be 800 for those of you keeping score). Large chunks of that will be repeated pages, but that’s okay; the idea is to set things down, then go refine them.

So that’s what I’m doing. I’ve got 5 pages of chapter 1 finished at this point. Which means I have 5 out of 800; a little less than 1%. That doesn’t seem like much, but I’ve been doing this now for exactly two days. At this rate, even if I spend as little time every week writing that I have been this week, I’ll be able to write about 8 pages a week. That’s 1% per week. Which means it would take almost two years to finish. But I’m not going to keep that slow of a pace.

For one thing, as I get farther along, I’ll be editing as much as writing, which will rack up ‘fresh’ pages pretty fast. For another, I know myself; I tend to write with a slow pace at first, then increase it almost exponentially, eventually sprinting to the end. I think I can probably safely say that I will do 8 pages this week, but next week I expect to hit 20, then 40 by the end of September. That would 5% in one month, which would mean 20 months… though I don’t expect to stay that slow. I’ve planned out 9 months for myself (starting on 9/20 and hopefully finishing by 6/20).

First, I’ll get it all written out. Then it’s just a matter of expanding, of editing tone, and of rewriting. Maybe I’ll throw it all away and start over at some point. Maybe I’ll do to myself what my adviser and mentor did to me with my Master’s thesis; I’ll look at it, then say to me “this is good, you’re on the right track. Now throw it away and start over.”

I started my prospectus with no idea what I was doing. I had two others I had seen, things to model after, but I didn’t know even the basic format, aside from what my colleagues had done before me.

So, I followed the model before me, and I put in a section describing the project, one about preliminary theory, one about research questions, and then a vague outline of the chapters in my dissertation. On top of that, I put in a literature review, which was largely taken from this blog. I ended up with a ‘draft’ of 52 pages.

I also ended up using the wrong tone, writing to the wrong audience, and generally doing everything wrong. That’s okay; it’s kind of how I work. I do it, I get told what’s wrong, and I do it again. Not very efficient, but it works. Still, there are a few things it would have been nice to know:

1. Length: A prospectus, including a literature review, should be around 20 pages. You are, after all, writing a PROPOSAL of your dissertation, not the dissertation itself. You may end up using the prospectus as your first chapter, but once again, 20 pages is a good length for that.

2. Tone: You are no longer a student. When you write the prospectus, you must do so as the expert on your topic. Not AN expert, but THE expert. You don’t need to stand on the shoulders of others anymore. No need to add a quote to back up what you’re saying. Your own voice is an authority, and needs to be presented with authority. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use other sources or research. It just means that instead of the “This is what I think, and here’s a quote by famous scholar who agrees with me” model, you follow the “Here is the what is what (famous scholar), and here’s what that means.”

3. Context: No, seriously, you’re not a student anymore. You aren’t writing this to get a grade, or to get approval of your teacher. There is no cookie at the end of this. What you’re writing is a short guide to your research. You are TELLING your committee what your dissertation is going to be about. No need to hide behind hedging language. No need to hide behind anything. You’re the authority, act like it. Once you do that, your committee says “Okay.” Then you write the actual dissertation. (THEN comes the cookie)

4. Audience: They are no longer your teachers. Most likely, your committee is made up of at least some of the professors you’ve had classes with, possibly as recently as last semester. But they aren’t your teachers anymore. They’re your colleagues. The second they shook your hand after that final stage of the exam process (for me it was the oral exam), they stopped being your teachers. They don’t take your opinions with a grain of salt anymore. You are a legitimate mind worth working with. Remember that. And they are other people, just like you, only a little bit (or a lot) further along the path. But you ARE on the same path now. You can write your prospectus with that in mind, writing it to others who respect your opinions, who are experts in their own rights, but not in the field you are talking to them about.

5. Literature Review: There needs to be a through line. You may know how all these things connect. After all, you read them and you put them together. Hell, you even put them together in a certain order. But other people aren’t you. Your colleagues are experts in THEIR fields, not in yours. Now that you are an expert, you need to put the information a way that they can follow. They don’t need the entire mosaic. What they need is a basic understanding of the field you’re bringing them into. So it’s your job to present the greatest hits, pointing out how those hits build into your field, and get out.

If someone had told me those 5 things before, then I think I would already be done my prospectus. But since no one did, I got to learn it myself. And maybe you’ll have to learn it yourself too. Maybe I’m just telling you the stove is hot; it’s up to you to burn yourself.

Of course, saying that “all I have left” is my dissertation is much like saying that after Normandy, all the allies had left was to defeat Germany. Saying “just” a dissertation is tantamount to “just” an arctic expedition, or “just” a trip to the moon.

Okay, maybe it’s not THAT bad. But it isn’t something I should go into lightly. That, I think, is fair.

My prospectus is almost finished. Which is good, because I promised it to my adviser by April 29. Thankfully, I just have to fill out what I intend to do in each chapter (I’m expecting 7 of them), and I’ve already made it through the first four, so I have just the three left to do. Maybe I’ll finish today, maybe tomorrow. Either way, it’s currently 47 pages, and I’m expecting to hit about 48-50.

It’s strange to look at that. When I was in college, which seems like forever ago, I wrote a senior thesis. I was very proud of myself that I managed to get it up to 42 pages (the nerd in me was ecstatic). I did this by writing three chapters. For my first Master’s Thesis, I revised those three chapters and added a fourth, bringing me up to 76. My second Master’s Thesis was quite a bit shorter, in the 30 or so page range. The idea that I’m writing a 50 page prospectus is just crazy to me.

After all, a prospectus is a paper writing what I INTEND to write in a dissertation. That is, it’s a proposal. It’s “This is what I want to write about.” This proposal is already almost the longest academic work I’ve ever created. Certainly, it’s the longest one I started from scratch. And yet, this is just the outline of what I intend to do for the big bad Dissertation.

I have no idea how long dissertations are supposed to be. To be fair, I have no idea how long a prospectus is supposed to be. Someone asked me recently, and the best answer I had was “between 25 and 50 pages or so.” Which really isn’t an answer. I might as well just have said “long.” And a dissertation? How much longer will that be? It’ll be long.

If you really want to do some math (and I usually do), I’m expecting each chapter to be about 30 pages, on average. With 7 chapters, that means 210 pages. Somehow, that seems short. Which in and of itself is ridiculous.

Anyway, that’s where I am now. Soon I’ll start posting more actual research, as I get back to it. For now, though, I need to stop procrastinating and finish the damned prospectus.

Seemed like a great idea at the time. And it was; the number of papers I have written with the help of my blog, the number of theories I have come to understand better, and the number of times I’ve turned here for inspiration is really pretty high. But recently, I’ve found another purpose.

I was asked by my current adviser to write a Literature Review for my prospectus. Not everything I’ve ever read, but a good grasp on the subject, enough to establish that I know the field. And that’s what I did. Putting it together helped me to organize my thoughts and to identify the main themes of my project, which in turn will help me finish off my prospectus.

At first, it was a daunting task. How could I do all that? How could I go through all the things I’ve read and synthesize them into a literature review? Then it hit me: I already have. That’s what this blog IS. Suddenly, the task of writing a Literature Review was less about a ton of writing and organizing and more about a synthesis and structuring of what I have already written. It’s not cheating: I wrote it to begin with. I didn’t write it for a publication, I wrote it for my own edification. That has always been pretty explicit, I think.

The end result was that in two days, I was able to put together about 30 pages of Literature Review. This blog has, once again, paid for itself. (Not that I pay for it)

Anyway, I don’t know if the way I’m heading is the right way. There’s another way to do this. Actually, there are a lot of different ways, but for me, usually one of these two is the best one to use. So if not the scattershot format I’ve been doing, what do I do? An outline. First basic, then fleshed out, then more fleshed out, and eventually into a paper of significant length. So let’s start with the outline.

I. Introduction

II. Preliminary Theory

III. Research Questions

IV. Methodology

V. Design of Study (with ethical concerns and rationale)

VI. Proposed chapters

VII. Literature Review/Theory

VIII. Conclusion

IX. Bibliography

As a start, that’s not so bad. Let’s fill it in a bit at a time. Start with research questions. Here are the potential questions I’ve come up with so far:

1. What qualifies as nonverbal communication in a textual space?
2. Is there a difference in the nonverbal communication of men and women in an internet environment?
3. Is there a difference in the nonverbal communication of the transgendered (as opposed to not transgendered) in an internet environment?
4. Is there a difference in the nonverbal communication of FTM and MTF in an internet environment?
5. Assuming the heteronormative binary is a bad thing, what is the solution? Is it better to have the ‘spectrum’ approach, the ‘galaxy’ approach, or something else?
6. What does multivalued logic tell us about sexuality? (If gender isn’t just M or F, but is M, F, X, or N, what does that mean?)

Now, I’m not sure the first three still apply. While nonverbal communication is important, I’m more concerned with Identity. So let’s start there:

1. What is identity online?
2. How is identity established and maintained online?
3. What part does gender play in online identity?
4. What explorations of gender can be performed online but not (easily) in the real world?
5. Assuming the Heteronormative Binary is a bad thing, what is the proper way to look at gender?
6. How does this conception of gender change the way we look at sexuality? (logic of sex)
7. Does identity online follow the patterns that research suggests it would?

Looking at those questions, I feel like I could write a very extensive paper for each one; which is good. I mean, that’s sort of the point, right?

What I don’t know is how many chapters to expect. I suppose it matters how long a chapter is. I mean, if a chapter is 10 pages, then I probably want 20-30. If a chapter is 50 pages, then 4 or 5 might be enough. And I know that this is largely up to me. So I think I’m going to say that chapters are 20 pages. Here’s my rationale:

10 pages is too short. 15 is about the limit of what I can throw together in a single day, but usually if I go back over one of those papers, I can find places to expand. When assigned to write 20-25 pages, I never had trouble hitting the minimum, but did sometimes have difficulty going past that. So 20 pages is about what I can comfortably maintain on the same topic. This is an average, not a hard design limit: I imagine the introduction and conclusion will be shorter (10-15 pages each), while the lit review might end up as many as 30 or 40 pages. But given that average, here are the chapters I think I want:

1. Introduction
2. Literature Review
3. Logic and Identity
4. Gender and Sexuality
5. Online and computer mediated communication
6. Online identity establishment and authentication
7. Gender examination online
8. The end of the Heteronormative Binary
9. Problems of online gender examination
10. Multiple identities: the only X and Y principle
11. Study of a website of online gender identity exploration (specifically, a transgender community)
12. Results of the study, theoretical implications
13. Directions for the future
14. Conclusion

At an average of 20 pages, that would put me at 280; possibly more than I need. But that’s okay; I’d rather have too much and have to cut than not enough.

I think that’s a pretty good amount of work for today.

School is a system of hoop jumping. Before college, you jump through hoops in order to GET to college. The more hoops you jump through, the better of a school you end up getting into. In college, you jump through hoops to either get a job or get into a good graduate program.

Eventually, though, you end up at the highest level you can get. For me, that’s the PhD program, where there were more hoops. First there was coursework. Then there were exams. Next comes the Prospectus, then the Dissertation and getting a job.

Well, I’m ready for that hoop. I’m in the air, trying to jump, and seeing what’s there on the other side. Hopefully it’s something I can land on without twisting anything.

And then adds some. I need to get started on this prospectus thing. Which means more research. Which is good; I’m good at research.

This leads me to the article for today: “Building Boxes and Policing Boundaries: (De)Constructing Intersexuality, Transgender and Bisexuality” by Betsy Lucal.

Her article is about constructing and maintaining the “boxes and boundaries with respect to sex, gender and sexuality” (519), which I am taking to basically mean the same as gender identity. We set ourselves up in these boxes, within these boundaries, and we expect to act within them, and expect others to act within them as well. Lucal writes that “Sexual deviance is assumed to be signaled by gender deviance, just as sexual conformity is assumed to be evidenced by gender conformity” (520). It’s important here that we note the difference between sex and gender; rather than sex meaning sexuality, Lucal is seeing gender as how we present ourselves and sex as biological facts of our bodies.

Lucal goes on to describe this (faulty) assumption of our culture. She writes that “Individuals are assumed to have one-and-only-one gender that matches the sex they were assigned at birth,” but also insists that “the existence of two dichotomous sexes is a social construction,” meaning that it is not actual fact, and that “most of the time, gender stands in for sex; we use gender to make assumptions about the sex category to which a person belongs” (521). We make this assumption, that people are one sex or the other, and also assume that their gender is conforming with that sex; gender is how we act (performative), sex is how we are born.

But, Lucal says, this is not the way things are. She writes that “The fact is that we have no definitive means for categorizing individuals as male or female” and that “the reality of intersexuality makes it obvious that even genitals do not provide the mutually exclusive (i.e. every person belongs to one and only one category) and dichotomous (i.e. there are just two categories) mechanism for dividing people that we imagine them to offer us” (522). So our experiences in the world tell us (or at least SHOULD tell us) that genitals don’t decide gender, and that there are more than just two mutually exclusive genders. This experience comes most clearly with the birth of the intersexed; that is, children born with both male and female genitalia. Most often, these infants are categorized as female, their penises removed, to avoid the possibility of a man with a small penis (523).

That intersexuality, the people born with both sets of genitalia, should be enough to show that the categories are not mutually exclusive. People CAN have both. The only reason we entertain the belief that there are two genders is that “we see two sexes not because there really are only two but because we believe there are (should be?) only two” (526). Because of this belief in a dichotomy, we set up gendered behavior as being one or the other, which in turn privileges one gender over the other no matter how hard we try. (At some point, something has to be feminine because it is not masculine, or vice versa)

Lucal goes on to talk about sexuality, and about how homosexuality is still more accepted than bisexuality; it’s hard for people to understand any non-monosexuality. Bisexuality suggests that it is on a spectrum between homo- and hetero-, but we’ve already seen that spectrums are inherently binary; bisexuality is just a movement from one end to the other. I bet Lucal would love to argue about that. Maybe some day I’ll get a chance.

Towards the end of the article, she says something very relevant to my research. She writes that “If there were no assumptions available to associate sex with gender, then there would be no basis for making assumptions about people’s sexual attractions and desires being sex/gender based” (534). I’m not sure how we could take assumptions away (i.e. make them unavailable), but it seems to me like the internet is the closest we can get to it. Which means that when we establish an identity online, that means we are not locked into having sexual attraction linked with gender or sex. In other words, the fact that someone is attracted to women doesn’t mean that they are gay, straight, or bisexual, because there is no guarantee that the person feeling the attraction is male, female, or some other gender.

To that end, I’m going to talk about three articles that involve Walter in some way: “Homosexual and Bisexual identity in Sex-Reassigned Female-To-Male Transexuals.” by Eli Coleman, Walter Bockting, and Louis Gooren; “A Further Assessment of Blanchard’s Typology of Homosexual Versus Non-Homosexual or Autogynephilic Gender Dysphoria.” by Larry Nuttbrok, Walter Bockting, Mona Mason, Sel Hwahng, Andrew Rosenblum, Monica Macri, and Jeffrey Becker; and “Gay and Bisexual Identity Development Among Female-To-Male Transexuals in North America: Emergence of a Transgender Sexuality.” by Walter Bockting, Autumn Benner, Eli Coleman. I’ll start from the top, and move to the article where Walter was the primary author.Coleman et al. write about some very interesting aspects of transgenderism that I hadn’t really considered. And the fact that I hadn’t considered it before really surprised me. Coleman et al. talk about the  FtM (female to male) transgendered, and the differences of that group. I’ve never met or spoken to any FtM, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t know they existed. But that doesn’t mean that FtM is the same as MtF, just the other direction.

There are some similarities. Gender dysphoria in FtMs tended to happen pretty early in life, much like with MtFs. And of those Coleman et al. studied, “All of the subjects became aware of their sexual attraction to men prior to reassignment” (41). So they identified as male before they developed a sexual identity (that is, an attraction to one gender, the other, or both). This causes the FtM to consider attraction to men as homosexual and attraction to women as heterosexual. This isn’t all that different from MtF.

But there are differences. Coleman et al. tell us that “the classification of homosexual and heterosexual, tranvestic, and nonhomosexual gender dysphoria does not apply to the female gender-dysphoric individuals. Therefore, for female-to-male transsexuals, classifaction based on sexual orientation does not seem relevant in clinical-decision making as to sex reassignment” (48), which suggests that the FtM works very differently from the MtF. Sexuality is not relevant, as it often is with MtF. It seems, by this reasoning, like it shouldn’t be relevant for MtF either, as they tend to feel the gender dysphoria before developing sexual attraction. The fact that it does seem to matter for the MtF suggests to me that maybe the problem is how we define sexuality.

And Coleman et al. agrees. They write that “Homosexuality and heterosexuality both might be better defined if one would not limit the definition to the genital criterion but also would include the element of perceiving a partner as belonging to one gender and not to the other” (48-49, my emphasis). So we might better understand hetero and homosexuality if we based it on gender perception, and not as much about genitalia. This is because it is much more rare for FtM to have full gender reassignment surgery than for MtF to have it. So many FtM are men with vaginas.

What I found most important in the above quote, the part I emphasized, was that this seems to accept a bivalent view of gender. That is, it suggests a binary. One gender and not the other. As if there were only two. I think that concept might be so pervasive that we tend not to even notice that we ascribe to it.

But let’s move on to the next article, to Nuttbrok et al. This article was more about transvestic fetishism (the desire to dress as the opposite gender) than about actual transgenderism. The article is a response to another article, and refutes much of what Blanchard said. For example, Nuttbrok writes that “The lifetime prevalence of transvestic fetishism was approximately three times higher among the non-homosexuals (69%) as compared to the homosexuals (23%) and significant differences across sexual orientation were also observed for lifecourse specified transvestic fetishism. These associations were strong but clearly not deterministic, however. Significant numbers of participants reported transvestic fetishism at odds with Blanchard’s predictions (23% of the homosexuals reported transvestic fetishism; 27% of the non-homosexuals did not report transvestic fetishism)” (9).

This is incredibly significant. Blanchard predicted that roughly the same number of homosexual and non-homosexuals engage in transvestic fetishism. But in fact, it seems that most transvestites are heterosexual. Or, as Eddie Izzard, the Executive Transvestite, would say, “Most transvestites fancy girls.”

That is not the most interesting part of what Nuttbrook et al. write, though. They point out that “transvistic fetishism may be a historically fading phenomenon” (10), which may be largely because of the taboo aspect of it; clothing becomes less gender-specific, and the taboo of it goes away. But it is also likely because of the ability of sexual assignment. That is, those transvestites who are actually transgendered are able to actually change genders, rather than simply dress that way.  That’s my own thinking, though, not what Nuttbrook says. He suggests that transvestic fetishism is generational; that is, that it is experienced primarily by members of one generation, and not continuing with others. He writes “Transvestic fetishism is not only a generational phenomenon but a phenomenon disproportionally experienced among Whites as compared to non-Whites (in North America)” (10). So not only is it more prevalent among a certain generation, but it’s also more prevalent among white people. No idea what that means, though a part of me is sure that I’m missing an opportunity for a joke.

Moving on to the article where Walter was the primary author, let’s discuss the emergence of a trangender sexuality. Walter writes that “Traditionally, transsexuals were described as women trapped in male bodies and men trapped in female bodies, reflecting a binary conception of gender; treatment focused on helping transsexuals to change sex and pass as nontransgender men and women. Once a generation of sex-reassigned transsexuals came of age, a transgender consciousness emerged, with individuals coming out and affirming a unique transgender from “outside the boundaries of gender, beyond the constructed opposition nodes” of male versus female (Stone, 1991, p. 295; see also Kimberly, 1997)” (689). In other words, transsexualism was originally seen as reinforcing the heteronormative binary of gender, but as a generation of sexually reassigned transgenders spent their lives on the other side of that binary (from where they were born), they began to note that there was more, that it wasn’t just men who should’ve been women or women who should’ve been men.

There seems to be a whole different type of sexuality among the transgendered. One we can see by the tendency towards bisexuality among the transgendered. Bockting writes that “Compared to nonstransgender gay and bisexual men, female-to-male transexuals were significantly more bisexual in all aspects of their orientation except for social preference (Table 3). For this one aspect, the difference was in the same direction, but not significant” (691). This suggests that for the transsexuals, gender was less and less important. What mattered was something else, something about the people and not just about their bodies. Of course, such a change brought with it social stigma, which the transgendered needed to respond to. And, according to Bockting, “In reaction to the ongoing social stigma and in an effort to liberate themselves from the confines of the binary gender schema, participants began to claim their own sexuality and argue for a greater visibility of their unique experience” (696). They began to develop the idea that there was a different sexuality, something outside the binary.

It’s a difficult position to be in. Knowing that you don’t fit in a binary doesn’t tell you where you do fit. Instead, they have to find a new path, as Bockting suggests. He writes that “Our findings suggest that norms about male versus female sexuality, and the social stigma associated with crossing the boundaries associated with these norms, play an important role. Those growing up with a cross-gender identity who were able to conform in a gender role and sexual orientation will likely experience a different developmental path than those who have to face the stigma attacked to being nonconforming in one or both of these areas (Bockting & Coleman, 2007)” (699). There’s a fair amount of personal identity consideration that must be done when developing this new sexuality.

This article doesn’t present a solution, and it doesn’t need to. The very idea that there is, or may be, more types of sexuality is enough to make us look beyond a binary. It’s also enough to look at the logic of sex and see that a third type of gender makes for a third type of sexuality. It explodes the binary. Which is good.

There will probably be more on this book at a later date, but for now, I’m just looking at Riki Wilchins’ contributions.

While Wilchins does begin “A Continuous Nonverbal Communication”  by placing a timeliness on the the essay (written a few weeks after the World Trade Center was destroyed), Wilchins then quickly jumps into some very interesting stuff, particularly about gender and sexuality. Wilchins writes that “I take it as self-evident that the mainspring of homophobia is gender: the notion that gay men are insufficiently masculine or lesbian women somehow inadequetly female. And I include sex, because I take it as obvious that what animates sexism and mysogyny is gender, and our astonishing fear and loathing around issues of vulnerability or femininity” (11). If this is true, then what people are reacting to is not so much homosexuality as it is an Otherness from the gender binary; someone who does not fit into the role of male or the role of female becomes the target of homophobia, regardless of their sexual activity.

This is important, because, as Wilchins reminds us, “although it looks like something we are, gender is always a doing rather than a being” (12, italics in original). Gender is performance, and when we perform outside the heteronormative binary, we draw criticism and even violent revulsion. Yet, as Wilchins writes, the youth today feel that “gender is the new fronteir: the place to rebel, to create new individuality and uniqueness, to defy old, tired, outdated social norms and, yes, occassionally drive their parents and sundry other authority figures crazy” (13). Gender, when seen as a performance, allows those who are examining and constructing their idenitty -usually but not always teenagers- to change the way they perform and experiment with other gender-ness.

Wilchins tells us that “gender is primarily a system of symbols and meanings – and the rules, privileges, and punishments pertaining to their use – for power and sexuality: masculinity and femininity, strength and vulnerability, action and passivity, dominance and weakness” (14, italics in original). This language presents gender in its binary form, but Wilchins seems to be pulling away from this, saying that while it is the predominant way we see it, that doesn’t make it right. Masculinity does not have to mean strength, action, and dominance.

However, and this is what was most important for me personally, when someone mixes these traits, that qualifies them as ‘queer.’ So if I identify myself and perform my gender as one of emotion (ie, vulnerability), action, and submission (ie, weakness), then I am queer. Particularly because I identify myself as a man. I am a man, and I think rather masculine, yet I identify as having primarily what the gender binary calls feminine traits. I like that this makes me queer; I’d been wondering how I could legitimately examine this world without being a part of it. This way, I am a part, but still an outlier. I am an insider who remains removed. I like that.

Once the introductions are done, Wilchins continues with “It’s Your Gender, Stupid!” Gender here is equated with pornography, in the sense that it is hard to define, but we know it when we see it. And, as Wilchins writes, “we see it once we know it” (23), a very important juxtoposition. We can know someone is presenting as male or female when we see them, meaning we know gender when we see it. But when we move outside the binary, when we expand our view of what gender is, then we must know gender before we see it.

It’s a question of identity. Do we identify more than two genders? Are the universal binary genders not all that exist (24)? Wilchins writes that “Identification is always an act, a repetition, a name we give to a collection of discrete traits, behaviors, urges, and empathies” (25). This means identification, like gender, is a performance. This is nothing surprising; anyone who has ever gone to a new school has experienced the possibility of changing their identity, being someone new, getting a ‘fresh start.’ If no one knows you, then you are free to be whoever you want. Rather than being as an opportunity to be dishonest, this freedom is usually used as an opportunity for people to be who they really are, not just who their past suggests they should be.

And just as identities evolve and are constantly shifting, Wilchins tells us that gender does the same. “Having any gender at all is really a sort of accomplishment, a sustained effort” (28). We must always continue to perform as whatever gender we identify as. If we stop performing as that gender, we bring questions of authenticity and begin to slide around the possibilities of gender.

Tht is not to say that gender is a spectrum. Wilchins is very insistent on this point. I myself was a bit uncomfortable with the idea of seeing gender as a spectrum, but Wilchins gave me the reason why. Wilchins tells me that “when you look closer, every spectrum turns out to be anchored by the same familiar two poles – male/female, man/woman, gay/straight. The rest of us are just strung out between them, like damp clothes drying on the line. The spectrum of gender turns out to be a spectrum of heterosexual norms, only slightly less oppressive but not less binary than its predecessors” (30-31). A spectrum really just is a binary. It’s just a binary that looks at the places between. But not as places in themselves so much as portions of one or the other side of the binary.

Wilchins at one point uses the pronoun ‘hir,’ describing someone who is not a he or a she. In the past, I’d more commonly seen “s/he” or such things, and I never understood why that was a problem. But now I know. “s/he” is a very clear binary. Someone is either she or he. And that slash, the space between them, is just a matter of degrees. I don’t think that all people are partially male and partially female. It’s a Sorietes Paradox.

Let me explain. When is a beach a beach? One grain of sand does not make a pile. But at some point, as you add one grain at a time, you DO have a point where it goes from not being a pile to being a pile. This is paradoxical because it at once suggests that one grain of sand DOES and DOES NOT make a difference to the quality of being a pile. We see this same kind of thing when we remove one hair at a time from someone’s head. At what point are they bald? Does one hair make them not-bald?

The heteronormative binary presents gender as this same paradox. It puts a Man on one end and a Woman on the other. Then, in between, there are little steps from one side to the other. So at what point does someone stop being a man and become a woman? 50%? 51? Same problem as the pile of sand. And if we throw other genders in there, like androgyny or a transgender, it doesn’t solve the problem. It just expands it. At what point between Man and Androgyn does a person stop being male?

Hir, on the other hand, is a step away from that binary. Hir, which I assume is a joining of “his” and “her” does suggest that the genders interweave with each other, but not necessarily as a spectrum. Gender doesn’t have to be a spectrum, and therefore does not have to be binary. Or, if you prefer, it is not binary, so it is not a spectrum. This sounds circular, and it is, but it’s circular in a tautological way, like “anything red is red” rather than in a fallacious way, like “the bible is true because it is the word of god, and I know it is the word of god because it says so in the bible.”

Wilchins ends the article with a similar point to circular reasoning. “The debate over the naturalness of binary sex is circular: Whatever reproduces must be one of two sexes because there are only two sexes to be. Thus, it is gender as a system of meaning that produces the ‘natural’ Mother Nature, male and female sexes, and the gender binary that establishes what is genderqueer” (32). In other words, it”s natural to have only two sexes because having only two sexes is natural. Which anyone can respond to with “but what if it’s not?”

*As for the same response to my point about gender binary and spectrum, my response is pretty simple. Maybe it isn’t; that is, maybe gender IS a binary and therefore a spectrum (or vice versa). But all the argument I have seen so far suggests that there are more than two genders (meaning it’s not binary) And if it’s not binary, it can’t be a spectrum. Spectrums are binary.